Perceiving facial emotions in context: The intertwined roles of emotional valence and consciousness.

Facial emotion perception in real life is inevitably influenced by the affective context, such as the expressions on nearby people's faces. However, to what extent and how the expressions of others exert a contextual influence on our interpretation of target facial emotions remains largely unclear. Using psychophysical methods, we demonstrated that the emotional facial context alone (i.e., without any evident social interaction cues) is sufficient to bias the perceived expression of an ambiguous target face (N = 160, healthy Asian college students, 2017-2025). Intriguingly, the contextual effect induced by faces with fearful, but not happy, expressions was regulated by observers' awareness of the context. For fearful contexts, the contextual effect showed a dissociation between nonconscious and conscious conditions, occurring only when the contextual face was not consciously perceived. By contrast, contextual faces expressing happiness biased emotion perception regardless of awareness. These findings broaden our understanding of the affective contextual effect in situations without explicit social relationships. More crucially, they unveil the intertwined roles of emotional valence and consciousness in emotional information integration, offering valuable insights into the intricate mechanisms whereby affective context shapes facial emotion perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).